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Zusammenfassung von Slouching Towards Utopia

Name: Slouching Towards Utopia
Rating: 4 (33 reviews)
Author: J. Bradford DeLong

J. Bradford DeLong

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

4 (33 Bewertungen)

32 Min.

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What’s in it for me? Understand world history through an economic lens.

For most of history, the majority of humanity lived in dire poverty. Revolutions in agriculture and commerce allowed us to produce enough food to spur population growth. But social, economic, and technological progress couldn’t keep up with the rising population. As a result, most working people scrambled to keep their families well-fed and healthy.

But in 1870, the tables turned. Revolutions in transport, communication, and organization brought world economies closer together – and allowed them to prosper. For the first time, technology was able to keep up with the growing human population. The path to a utopia where all humans enjoyed food, shelter, and a decent life became walkable. Eighteen seventy to 2010 saw more techno-economic progress per year than previous times did in 12 years. People’s average income increased by a factor of 8.8. This isn’t to say that things were rosy. The twentieth century saw totalitarian ideologies kill millions. And the exploding wealth was unequally distributed – leaving the Global South, racial minorities, and women to catch up later. We were slouching, not running, on the path to utopia.

And then we lost it. In 2010, economic growth ground to a halt in most Western countries. The great recession of 2008 eroded our trust in the economy. Politics had to reckon with another problem: letting the economy solve humanity’s problems didn’t necessarily produce the most satisfying results.

In this Blink, we’ll learn how technological change enabled the global explosion of wealth. But we’ll also look at how governments mismanaged markets, how fascist and socialist ideologies turned dystopian, and why progress eventually turned sour.

Technological progress allowed the world to escape the Malthusian devil.

Just before 1800, English scholar Thomas Robert Malthus wrote his famous book An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus argued that unless curbed by religion, monarchy, and patriarchy population growth would lead humanity into a poverty hell of war, famine, and disease.

He had reason to be pessimistic. The Industrial-Commercial revolution of the 1500s had allowed the human population to break its previous growth limit of 0.09 percent per year. But the rate of technological progress couldn’t keep up with this population growth. Even after the Industrial Revolution in 1770, population growth outran technological growth by a factor of 1.5 to 2.

Yes, inventions such as the printing press, the windmill, and the steam engine had revolutionized industry. But the benefits accumulated at the top – the rich got richer, while the rest of the population languished.

But in 1870, things changed forever. Humanity’s technological and organizational capacities began to grow – at a rate of 2.1 percent a year.

What happened? It wasn’t just new inventions. Instead, the Northern economies had invented invention. Previously, innovations had been singular discoveries that provided new ways of doing old things – weaving clothes, for example.

But in 1870, the North Atlantic economy began to develop the industrial research lab. Discoveries became systematic and were deployed methodically. On top of that, new communication technologies allowed ideas to disseminate faster. Inventors like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla had their ideas amplified million-fold by the corporations that backed them.

After 1870, technology outran population growth. Working-class people began to benefit from the advance of industry and a new middle class developed. Working conditions still seemed grueling by modern standards. As a blue-collar worker at US Steel in 1910, there was a one in seven chance you would die on the job before your 50th birthday. But you “only” worked six days a week, and you earned a whopping $900 a year. By global standards, this was pure luxury. And wages only kept rising. Immigrants from all over the world flocked to the US for a chance to become part of the new world.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes rightly called 1870 to 1914 an “economic Utopia.” And the US was holding the banner.

Globalization accelerated economic growth – but it did so unevenly.

Technological progress eventually generated another accelerant of growth: globalization.

Innovations in transport, such as steamships and railroads, allowed international trade to pick up the pace. And innovations in communication eased the issues of trust and information transfer that international trade brought with it. By 1870, investors in London could call companies in Bombay.

During World War I, the vision of utopia began to blur.

The Global North led the economy, and thereby the history, of the twentieth century. For the first half, it would be a history of chaos and destruction.

No one could have predicted it. The years between 1870 and 1914 had been more peaceful and prosperous than ever. On an economic level, war just didn’t make much sense anymore. Why spend money on military conquest when you could make money manufacturing and trading?

The Great Depression proved that only an active government can ease an economic crisis.

Ever since history became economic, the world’s governments have been guided by two distinct schools of thought.

One is that of economist Friedrich Hayek, who believed that the economy solves any problem it creates on its own. Interfering with the market only creates more problems down the line. Hayek’s philosophy went like this: “The market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market.”

Fascism and socialism promised their followers utopia but ended up killing millions.

In the fragile period between the wars, three powerful ideologies confronted each other. The first was the old order of semi-liberal industrial capitalism. But the Great Depression had called this approach into question.

The alternatives that emerged were as powerful as deadly. Both fascism and socialism would go on to kill millions of people.

After World War II, social democracy and capitalism won the Cold War.

After World War II, the world was reordered yet again. The British Empire was dead for good, and the US had more power than ever before. The Western world was to be shaped in the American model. What would that model be?

The Great Depression had provided some powerful lessons. Countries which had bet on austerity had suffered longest and hardest, while those which had increased government spending had recovered quickly.

Economic growth didn’t benefit everyone equally.

So far, we’ve focused our discussion on the Global North – countries like the US, Britain, Germany, and France. But what about the rest of the world?

First, let’s recap: the claim isn’t that humanity came anywhere close to utopia during the long twentieth century, but rather that given the rapid economic growth during that time, utopia began to seem like an achievable goal – at least in theory. But we were slouching, rather than striding toward it. Because in practice, wealth didn’t develop equally for everyone.

With the neoliberal turn of the 1970s, income inequality deepened.

The “Thirty Glorious Years” after World War II set a high bar for the economies of the Global North. In 1973, people enjoyed around 2 to 3 times more material wealth than their parents. But in the 1970s, the oil crisis tripled the price of gas everywhere, causing the inflation rate to rise to between 5 and 10 percent per year. Economic growth slowed and old fears crept back.

With memories of the Great Depression fading, people began to question the idea of government intervention. The center shifted right. In an attempt to curb inflation, President Richard Nixon had already reduced government spending and let unemployment soar. He called it “shock therapy” for the economy.

The financial crisis of 2008 spelled the end of the long century.

In 2007, everything still seemed fine. There was virtually no inflation, productivity was rising, and the Global South was finally catching up to the North. US President George W. Bush had doubled down on the deregulation of his predecessors, and it seemed to be working.

The dot com crash of 2000 had been all but a small hiccup. But in 2008, the housing bubble burst, and things came crashing down fast. In the “general glut” that followed, people scrambled to sell their assets and turn them into cash.

Final Summary

Between 1870 and 2010, the world saw an explosion of material wealth. Technological progress and globalization lifted the world out of mass poverty. The wealth was distributed highly unequally, but humanity began walking a path that may well have ended in utopia. Briefly, the murderous ideologies of socialism and fascism blocked all possibilities. But after World War II, social democracy blossomed. Governments turned away from Hayek’s laissez-faire approach to the economy and embraced Keynes: guarantee full employment through spending. But the neoliberal turn of the 1970s reversed this progress and ultimately culminated in the 2008 financial crisis. By 2010, the path to utopia was no longer visible. Economic growth in the Global North has ground to a halt and the long century has ended.

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Worum geht es in Slouching Towards Utopia?

Slouching Towards Utopia (2022) examines the “long century” between 1870 and 2010, during which technological progress, globalization, and the advent of social democracy opened a new horizon of human progress. Barring the horror years of World Wars I and II, humanity seemed to be on a slow, uneven crawl toward utopia. But in 2010, the tables turned. Economic progress in the Global North ground to a halt.

Wer Slouching Towards Utopia lesen sollte

History buffs
John Maynard Keynes fans
Anyone wondering how the world became so unequal

Über den Autor

James Bradford DeLong is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley. Under the Clinton Administration, he was deputy assistant secretary of the US Treasury, working on the federal budget as well as trade agreements such as the Uruguay Round and NAFTA. His previous books include The End of Influence and Concrete Economics.

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